After nearly 10 years of hosting with Dreamhost (including this site) with mostly okay service — it had its bad days! — I decided to migrate everything over to Webfaction (affiliate link) which I have been using since around 2014 for a few things.

In the words of Dreamhost’s billing:

You are not within our 97 day money back guarantee (it has been 3585 days since 2007-05-25)!

Woot!

The following points tipped me over:

• The ability to deploy long running services (called applications) that run on a port
  • This port can be exposed if needed, though rarely do you want this.
  • Instead you deploy websites whose requests are proxied through to these internal applications. With this, even on a shared host, I can (and do) run a memory-bounded JVM application on Jetty, for example. You can also run high-performing, low-footprint web servers to host your applications, and save memory.
  • Your stock standard static/php/cgi application also exists.
• PostgreSQL Support by default! Seriously, Dreamhost, it is stupid how you don’t yet have this for shared hosting. Sticking with MyOrac^H^H^H^HSQL is most unsound.
• A generous 1GB guaranteed memory for applications in the base USD 10/mo plan.
• Like Dreamhost, it has SSH access. A crucial facility for developers, even on shared hosting.

I’m only on Webfaction’s basic plan, so have no comment on how they scale. But it’s a much more flexible, and competitively-priced shared hosting option.